Effective Monitoring & Alerting

Preface;
Who Should Read This Book;
Conventions Used in This Book;
Using Code Examples;
Safari® Books Online;
How to Contact Us;
Acknowledgements;
Chapter 1: Introduction;
1.1 Monitoring, Alerting, and What They Can Do for You;
1.2 Monitoring and Alerting in a Nutshell;
1.3 The Challenges;
1.4 Important Terms;
Chapter 2: Monitoring;
2.1 The Building Blocks;
2.2 Drawing Conclusions from Timeseries Plots;
Chapter 3: Alerting;
3.1 The Challenge;
3.2 Prerequisites;
3.3 Understanding Failure and Its Impact;
3.4 Anatomy of an Alarm;
3.5 Case Study: A Data Pipeline;
3.6 Types of Alerts;
3.7 Setting Up Alarms;
3.8 Alerting Suggestions;
Chapter 4: At Scale;
4.1 Implications of Scale;
4.2 Composition of Large-Scale Systems;
4.3 Commonalities of Large-Scale Alerting Configurations;
4.4 Monitoring Coverage;
4.5 Managing Large Alerting Configurations;
Chapter 5: Monitoring in System Automation;
5.1 Choosing Appropriate Maintenance Times Automatically;
5.2 Controlling the Rate of Upgrade;
5.3 Recovery-Oriented Admission Control;
5.4 Automated Deployment and Rollback;
Chapter 6: The Work Environment;
6.1 Keeping an Audit Trail;
6.2 Working with Tickets;
6.3 Dealing with Anomalies;
6.4 Learning from Outages;
6.5 Using Checklists;
6.6 Creating Dashboards;
6.7 Service-Level Agreements;
6.8 Preventing the Ironies of Automation;
6.9 Culture;
Chapter 7: Measuring Success;
7.1 The Feedback Loop;
7.2 Ticket Reporting;
7.3 Measuring Detectability;
7.4 Transition to Automated Alarms;
7.5 Maintenance Overhead;
7.6 How (Not) to Measure;
Chapter 8: The Principles;
8.1 Get in the Habit of Measuring;
8.2 Draw Conclusions Reliably;
8.3 Monitor Extensively;
8.4 Alarm Selectively;
8.5 Work Smart, Not Hard;
Setting Up OpenTSDB;
The Software;
First Steps;
Gathering Data System-Wide;
Timeseries Plots;
Get Involved;

Slawek Ligus works as a consultant and freelance developer, based out of Dublin, Ireland. In the past he held a position of Web Operations Engineer at A9.com, where he contributed to automation of monitoring and infrastructure behind Amazon's powerful search engine.